Israel Residency: Poetry, 2005

Sonnet 1

A bouncy bound towards arms around one more,
chronicled and measured in rank; one more
stripped of numberless innocence in love.
An admitted long shot trial turned trance,
delirious in sonance like sung bowl:
my fingers wet about the rim and filled
with charge like constant first kiss; engorged blood
electric in fast flow. My descent was
like gravity, current of urgency
drowning me in cascading waterfall
pleasure devoid of resistance to the
pull of fleshy awe. I had known nothing
like that tether before and found myself
engrossed; the heart and mind, blissfully blind.


Sonnet 2

The cleft was the clean callous comfort of
distance. I telephoned it in and felt
unleashed, no confrontation to confront,
and the brunt of the blow left only for
you to absorb. The space between replaced
resolve, courage was in serious lack,
but then again I was unaccustomed
to the production of such scarring wounds,
my own soul a map of rocky terrain;
a surface in rough elevation, but
our break was just a beginning and our
past and present seem defined by stages
of separation, and our endurance
a frequent thematic reoccurrence.


Sonnet 3

When the years blundered by, and I, eye to
eye, with a familiar unwrapped package,
my lies and lust emerged and blurred in haste
and salivation and invitation
became a mind masturbation and I
plunged to a renewed taste and appetite
for new addictions uncovered like no
other, promptly smothered in self-doubt, and
defined behaviors forbidden beneath
and above covers; new manners that left
us distant like stars, bright and burning with
arms-reach yearning, oscillating day by
day, and broken behaviors built a sky
fallen in full heaps, rubble at our feet.